Samhain - 18th of Lunar Dawn, 5184 RH | 4 Era of Harmony
Hackamore Valley Observatory - Evergreen Falls
Deeper into the heart of the forest than anypony had a right to be, an iron door creaked open on rusty hinges. It didn't lead to a prison, though Samhain often felt like it did. The door led to a basement, a dingy, dark, small basement which somepony long ago had filled with an excessive number of filing cabinets.
I should really report this door doesn't lock right, the grimestreaked orange thestral thought as she slumped her way through the old observatory dorm’s entrance. Her slim frame blocked the golden rays of dappled sunlight, and cast a long shadow down the hallway.
She stood on the landing for several short moments, contemplating how she’d make her way down the rickety old stairs without breaking her neck. It was hard enough to do when rested, let alone coming back after a triple shift.
Sam brushed a stray lock of her strawberry red mane from her face, then winced as her hoof came away with a thick blob of oily grease.
Lovely… she thought as she wiped half-dried grease from her bloodshot emerald eyes and yawned, arching her back as she stretched her wings, then rearing up to stretch her forelegs. She'd twisted her left forehoof climbing down the scaffolding earlier in the day.
Back in her prime, she’d once been one of the more fit and active members of the thestral tribe. The injury would have been nothing. Yet at the dawn of her middle-aged years, the dull ache was enough to prompt her to descend the old steps in a bipedal stance.
Rearing up barely helped. Sam was too tired for her balance to be working correctly. She was also a little too upset. A tourist had come by while she was on shift and done what strangers do and insisted she wasn’t a pony.
Sam understood why. A pony’s sense of smell was important to them, and Sam simply didn’t have any pheromonal signature at all. She looked like a pony, but didn’t smell like one. In fact, she smelt like nothing at all. It threw most Equestrians for a loop.
Fortunately for the poor mare, Evergreen Falls was one of the most remote towns in Equestria. Everypony knew everypony, tourists were rare, and the town’s ponies were very self-sufficient. Yet, there always seemed to be some need for Sam's specific skills as a repair pony and general contractor.
In an ideal world, Sam’s disability payments would have covered a home, food, and the essentials. Unfortunately, way out at the edge of Equestria and at the very end of its logistics chain, things were simply too expensive for her to not work.
The stairs creaked and groaned under her weight, prompting her to subconsciously flap her wings to take as much weight off the wood as possible and keep her balance. Sam returned to a quadrupedal stance at the base of the stairs and stepped out of her old black leather work boots on the way to her bed.
She passed row after row of dusty files, shedding her saddle bags, tool belt, and olive jumpsuit as she walked, her head hanging almost as low as the bags under her eyes. With her jumpsuit removed, the basement was slightly illuminated by the glow of a small hoof-sized blue diamond set into Sam's barrel.
It sat flush with her skin, fused to flesh and bone alike. It looked for all the world like a mage gem she'd had a skilled back-alley doc implant, like the ones to store excess flight magic. That sort of body modification had become common over the last decade or so, as a means to compete with griffonese cybernetics.
The blue glow often made it hard for Sam to fall asleep.
Sam yawned and scratched her flank, her hoof disturbing her cutiemark slightly. Like everypony who had immigrated to Equestria rather than being born within the storied nation, Sam's name and cutiemark were unusual, being that they were the product of her homeland. Ponies often asked her what the triangular formation of "bent wrenches'' meant. Sam had lost track of how many times she had explained the mark on her flanks was the Gaitlic symbol for "repair", and based on the Equestrian recycling symbol.
Sam was pretty sure whatever that number was, it had to be less than a tenth of the times she'd had to explain her name wasn't weird. It was foreign. If one were to translate Samhain to Equish, her name would be Autumn Twilight. Or, if you wanted to be true to her people's ancient roots, Summer's End.
Not at all a weird name for a pony, but Sam would be damned before she let people translate her name. It was weird enough to her that Equestrian names were just random Equish words. Modern ones. Not even a few centuries old.
The exhausted handymare's tired musings halted as she reached her goal; an old mattress in the corner of the basement covered in exactly one thin blanket and nestled in the middle of a small pond of empty cans and bottles next to a chunky gray radio base station and a chunkier grayer alarm clock.
The clock's glowing red, eight-segment display panel, presently read 0622.
"Dammit…" She muttered quietly into the windowless basement.
On the upside, she reached her mattress.
"Praise the moon," Sam said as she fell face-first into the mattress, instantly transmuting into a heap of orange fur and feathers with a dollop of amber hair.
The blackness claimed her instantly.
⁜ ⁜ ⁜
The sharp crack of radio static shook Sam from her sleep. She whimpered as every cell in her body told her what she already knew.
The sleep needed to be doubled.
Sam glanced at her clock. Its mocking runes read 0803.
"Sam? Come in, over." A stallion's voice called through the tinny speaker.
Sam moaned and rolled over, facing away from the radio as if that would magically make the call go away.
"Sam? We have a code, Mauve. Come in, over," the stallion repeated after exactly two seconds of silence.
Sam's face contorted with rage as she suppressed a scream. She picked her head up enough to see she'd dropped her saddlebags a vast and cavernous six steps away from her bed.
"Buck me…" She grumbled, her nose wrinkling irritably.
Sam's radio was an import from Minos. The handset was, well, a handset. She owned a set of manipulator gauntlets for using minotaur and griffon tech, like most ponies. Unfortunately, bionic gauntlets are only helpful when one has them at hoof.
Or is at least willing to get up and get them.
Sam, exhausted beyond belief, elected to roll the handset onto its side and push down on the transmit button with the flat of her hoof as if batting for the snooze button.
"I got almost two hours of sleep, Apple. Go buck yourself," Sam said as firmly as she could.
Given her current situation, the firmness was somewhere between sponge cake and a wad of hair.
"That's hardly professional language. I could have you written up. Over," Apple Brandy said in his usual emotionless stick-all-the-way-up voice.
"No, you can't. I'm a freelance contractor," Sam corrected, yawning. "It's just a mauve. Go take care of it yourself."
"Negative," Apple reported with the corporate coldness Sam was both accustomed to and about one more sleepless night away from crusading against via an up armored bulldozer. "Silkwing’s moat pump failed. Over."
Sam released the radio transmit button and released a long primal scream into the bowls of the basement.
Silkwing hadn't gotten her food shipment for the last two weeks. Everyone knew this. She had let everypony with a Y chromosome know to stay away from her yard until the shipment came in. But by now she was probably only a few hours away from attacking anypony, male or female, for her next meal.
Sam pressed the button again. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes. It's the best you're going to get."
"Glad to hear it. Report once the work is done. Over and out."
Sam sat up in bed, took a series of rapid huffing breaths, then turned and punched the basement wall. A good sized chip of concrete flew off into the murky depths of the basement, clattering to the ground.
She paused, ignoring how bad her hoof hurt now, took another deep breath and sat up.
No time for coffee, Sam silently moaned as she rifled through her can and bottle pile for anything not empty.
Her hooves found a fifth of malt whisky with a mouthful left. Not bothering to look for anything more full, she ripped the cap off with her teeth, slugged back the brown liquid in a single gulp, then pulled herself to her hooves as the bottle dropped to the floor with a crack.
Sam staggered to her saddlebags and popped the left pouch open. She rummaged inside until her hooves found a pair of brass and leather gauntlets. She slipped her hooves into them with practiced ease, her frogs slotting into the control pads and activating the devices as if they were part of her own body.
The gloves tightened themselves around her hooves to prevent slippage, then sprang to life, replicating the full strength and dexterity of a minotaur's hands. Strange as these devices seemed to older ponies they were amongst the only way for ponies to easily use technology made by griffons or minotaurs. Technology which had become the bulk of Equestrian imports over the last fifty years.
At least they don't make much noise, Sam thought to herself as the purely mechanical gloves’ servos hummed and whirred as she moved.
Making use of the bionic gauntlets, Sam fished through her bag some more and withdrew a small steel Kirro brand lighter and a wax paper bag labeled "Steel Horse: Authentic Jamanecan Hash", started to open the bag then closed her eyes tightly.
"No… Not that one. Stupid tired-ass brain," she grumbled, putting the bag and lighter back and rummaging once more.
This time she withdrew a small tin of Pewter's Peppy Step: Trucker's Aid, unscrewed the lid, downed three of the tiny gold tablets (forgetting in her exhausted state that she needed four), then took advantage of the no-reason valve and spigot on the cold water line running along the basement ceiling to get a combination drink and shower.
Thus thoroughly wet, tired, and miserable, Sam began using a push broom to sweep the spilled water towards the basement floor drain, which wasn't at the lowest point for no discernible reason, and focused every last ounce of her groggy thoughts on a single mental picture.
A large field at the edge of a forest. The sky was green, the grass yellow, and the trees on the edge of the clearing towered their way into the sky as if they had all decided to one-up the mightiest skyscrapers ever constructed by mortal hooves. The tree tops were connected by rope bridges that hung from large platforms, atop which entire towns sat, sprawling through the canopy.
Below the platforms the…
The…
Sam narrowed her eyes irritably. Welp, there goes the old imagination. Shame, I would have liked to paint that one. She thought to herself as she started a mental timer for six hours.
That's how long the pills would keep her up in the usual semi-functional state.
Sam quickly got dressed, strapped on her saddlebags and tool belt, took the walkie-talkie tuned to her base station, and clipped it to her belt. Then she set her gauntlets to hoof mode so she could walk freely and made her way up the stairs, entirely ignoring their creaks and protesting tremors. She pathed through the first floor of the old observatory, making her way past the old breakroom, several small laboratories, the offices, and out into the lobby.
As she walked towards the glass front wall to exit through the main door, the sign on the far side of the parking lot caught Sam's eye. Sompony had graffitied the sign making it read "Heck more Valley Observatory" instead of "Hackamore Valley Observatory".
Her ears flicked back as she stared at the sign. They're going to make me clean that… Why would you do that? It's not even funny.
Sam pushed the door open, stopping mid-push as the rustle of paper caught her ears far more sharply than it would have if she weren’t on stims. She looked down to see a pair of envelopes and picked them up. The first was from a previous doctor. The second was from the Royal Office of Labor.
A smile split Sam's lips as she looked at the second envelope. The town's department of civic works had absolutely screwed her over by forcing her to purchase her own supplies and then refusing to reimburse her, but that's what the national government was for. Keeping petty small-time bureaucrats the buck in line.
This will be the check, Sam nodded to herself and opened the second letter. I can go back to living in the hotel, eating food that's made of food, and drinking stuff other than the beer random ponies pay me with since they're short cash too.
Ms. Samhain,
I am writing to inform you that due to the recent attack on Canterlot, Ponyville, Manehatten, et cetera by Tirek, we will not be able to provide reimbursement funds for supplies purchased under your company: That Irbrish Contractor Mare Ltd.
We understand that you have incurred some expenses while working on city projects, and we appreciate both your efforts and the situation local officials have placed you in. However, we do not have liquid capital at present to fill your outstanding claims for 34,000 bits as most of our capital has been reallocated by the Crown following the enactment of State of Emergency protocols.
It is unlikely we will be able to provide any relief for a period of 60 days. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via the return address.
As a final note, I would like to inform you that while we cannot at present provide financial recompense we have obtained a lawyer willing to represent you in a case against the Evergreen Falls Civics Office. We have also been in contact with your mayor who is fully supportive of your case. You should expect a letter from the office of Dusty Bindings Esq within a few days.
Apologetically Yours,
Soap Bubble
Sam's left eye twitched violently. She felt she should be far more angry than she was. It took her a few minutes of standing there, trying to burn holes through the paper with her eyes to remember just how dull those stupid tabs made everything feel.
"Seriously… It wasn't that big a deal. How much damage could that asshole have caused in what, a couple days?" Sam demanded of the empty parking lot.
She turned her attention to the second letter to see if it had anything to cheer her up.
Mrs. Samhain,
Sam facehooved, a small star of pain spreading across her forehead thanks to the brass gauntlets wrapped around her hooves.
"... I've never been married…" She grumbled before going back to reading the letter.
After reviewing your case, I have determined there has never been any instances of pheromonal negation cases similar to your own. At least, none that stabilize into a permanent state as yours has. Medical science could benefit from a closer examination of your specific condition.
As we do not keep medical samples beyond 180 days, and you last came to my practice seven years ago, I would like you to come in so a fresh tissue sample can be taken.
I cannot afford to pay you for
Sam crumpled the letter into a ball, fished her lighter out of her saddlebag and lit it with a deft flick of her mechanical digits. Then incinerated the letter.
I love these things. Too bad I can't afford implanted ones. I'd love touch feedback.
There was no way in Tartarus she was traveling out to Fillydelphia on her non-existent dime to get under the knife again. Not without a substantial cash offer.
Sam grumbled and trotted across the empty parking lot. She kept an eye on the half dozen old oil stains present in a few of the gravel lot's spaces on the way. The observatory had been abandoned for years before she came to town, but some of the oil stains on the gravel lot still looked fresh.
A minor anomaly. One Sam only concerned herself with when they moved.
Satisfied they were still where they had been last, Sam trotted into town. She didn't trust herself to fly on pep pills. The way they sucked all energy and impact from the world was something she didn't want to fly with. Fortunately the walk into town was short, a mere six minutes.
Unfortunately, the beauty of the walk was lost on her. Ridge Way wound along the side of the valley, overlooking the entirety of Evergreen Falls.
The town had been built along the sides of the River Aramen, right at the head of what was now called Hackamore Valley, where the Seven Waterfalls of Aramen united to form the river's source. It was said that this very spot had been the site of a palace before the dawn of ponykind. No evidence of a shimmering crystal cathedral remained, but Evergreen Falls certainly seemed like the place one might find one.
Existing within the almost perfectly circular pocket of pristine natural beauty, the town took the form of a small cluster of buildings centered around the river itself, with a large town square connected by bridges on the north and south sides serving as the beating heart of the community.
The streets were cobbled, the homes fashioned from hewn logs or clay brick, and the roofs were shingled in slate. Here and there, modern concrete structures had been peppered, and a large water wheel system sat under the falls, providing Evergreen Falls with electricity via its web of snaking wires. Many buildings were topped by a UHF antenna or long-range comms dish since, ironically enough, it was cheaper to use foreign entertainment than Equestrian ones, given their proximity to Vanhoover.
Despite being an obviously older town upgraded again and again as generations had come and gone, Evergreen Falls had a strange unity to it. As if every change had been largely accepted. As if people had thought things out before, during, and after making every change. As if there was a reason there had to be a hardware store at 14 Picket Road rather than 13 or 15.
On a good day, Sam loved to wonder about all the little details the town had to offer. Unfortunately, that was not something she got to do today. Instead, she just walked. Thoughtlessly replying "Hi." to the ponies she passed on the way through town.
All of them greeted her fondly. In the short year and a half Sam had been in town, she'd made plenty of friends. It was impossible for a good repair pony to not endear themselves to the hearty rural townsponies.
The only pony that stuck in Sam's mind was a pale blue mare she saw once every couple months. Some magician or something. Lived here, did shows on the road.
The only reason she remembered the encounter was that she'd had Sam's hat. Somehow.
I must have left it at the culvert entrance, Sam mused silently. When did I take it off? She didn't go in there, did she? If she did, I guess the welds held. Since she's alive and all.
Sam spared the brainpower to adjust her brown flat cap so it would stop slipping down into her view. The sunlight glinting off her old ranger pin and into her eye was more than a little annoying and—
Sam arrived at her destination, which deleted her entire train of thought as she progressed onto stage two of the project. Walking up to the front door of the small log cottage and knocking on the door.
A moat separated this particular cottage from the sidewalk and the neighboring properties. It wasn't more than a step across and a hoof deep, but it served its purpose just fine. At least it did when it was working.
Sam glanced down as she stepped over the seemingly decorative water feature. "Yep, still," she noted out loud.
She walked to the front door, careful to only step on the center of each of the walkway's stepping stones, then lifted the door's wrought iron knocker and struck the door exactly six times.
It only took a moment for the door handle to turn and creek open just a crack. Enough for Sam to see in and Silkwing to see out without letting the morning sunlight flood into her home.
Sam squinted through the darkness to make out the bat pony she was looking at. Deep purple mane, charcoal gray fur, eyes the color of fresh blood, cutiemark in the shape of a crescent moon behind a dark cloud.
Yep, night pony. Poor thing. Sam said as she took in Silkwing's gaunt appearance.
Silk stood shakily in the doorway. Her normally seductive figure had withered away into a skeletal form. Her eyes were bloodshot and sunken. Her fur had lost all of its usual luster, and when she breathed, Sam could see her gums had retracted notably, making her fangs even more pronounced than usual.
"Here for the pump," Sam said in pseudo-greeting.
Silk winced and looked Sam over from head to hoof, despite it obviously hurting for her to move her neck. "Pep pills again?"
"No sleep. Had to weld the spiders back in again. Took till… sixish," Sam reapplied, blinking slowly. "Any word on your food?"
Silk nodded once, then winced and rubbed her neck. "Yeah… Two weeks. The bloodbank's out. Because of Tirek."
Sam's brain chugged for several long moments as she did her best to remember what would happen given that much time.
"Can you make it that long?" She asked at last.
Silk shrugged.
"Well, if you do go feral and eat somepony," Sam began, her eyes glinting with as much anger as she could muster. "Do me a favor and get rid of—"
Silk smiled, the dangerous smile of a starving predator. "If I could, I would, but I won't be… Sapient... If it comes to that. So, best get that pump working, right?"
"Right," Sam agreed, nodding once. "But like, seriously. If you can. Please? I'm tired of being homeless."
Silk took a step back, her eyes widening. "You're… You said you had a place to sleep!"
"Observatory basement," Sam said as she turned around to get to work. "There's a mattress."
"You can sleep here if you like!" Silk called after her as Sam made her way down the steps.
"Maybe... Are you close to wanting to prey on mares too? Or is it still just stallions?" Sam asked in a way to calm a tone for what she said.
"No comment," Silk reapplied, quickly shutting the door.
Sam nodded twice and made her way around the side of the cottage to the backyard. Sam loved Silk's yard. It had a wonderful garden which really stimulated the imagination. Especially at night when everything was in bloom and the—
Maybe I should have offered her a quick drink? She could, like, stop before killing me, right? Seems lucid enough for that still, Sam wondered, the thought entirely removing the thoughts and memories of the night garden from her mind even as she passed through it to a shed at the back of the property.
Sam reared up so she could fetch her copy of the Town Maintenance Key from her jumpsuit pocket and reach the shed's padlock which had been placed higher than any foal could hope to reach. At least, without a friend to stand on. Or an object of some kind. Or a ladder.
Wow, putting things up high to keep kids out is dumb. Especially since Dew could just fly up here, Sam noted as her gauntlet fingers slipped the key into the lock and popped it open.
"Sam! Thank goodness," a stallion's voice called, carrying the sound of relief with it.
Sam turned to see a tan and black earth pony she didn't recognize standing on the other side of a hedge row from Silk's home. Sam stared at him for a moment, doing her best to make a face that would somehow prompt the stallion to tell her how he knew her.
"Please tell me you're here to fix the pump," he said with a nervous flick of his tail. "Silk keeps staring at me from her window, and not in the normal way…"
Sam blinked slowly. "Normal way?"
The stallion nodded. "Yea… She's got a crush on me. I'm sure of it. Always watches me when I'm out in my yard, waves hi, and brings me dinner sometimes. I was going to ask her on a date but I heard she didn't get her pint this month and, well… They say she goes for stallions first since she's straight and all and uh, yea."
"Yea. That makes sense," Sam said, nodding slowly.
The stallion frowned. "Pep pills again?"
Sam's brow furrowed. "I should make a sign to put on or something…"
The stallion snorted angrily and stamped a forehoof into the ground. "I tell you, next town meeting, I am demanding we hire at least two more maintenance ponies! You can't keep doing this on your own."
"Someone's gotta," Sam said with a shrug. "What if Silk gets out while starving? What if no one repairs Twine's shed after the next full moon? What if no one—"
The stallion nodded and held up a hoof. "I was born here, Sam. I know. I'm glad you put in the work. Thank you for helping keep everypony safe. I just know you'll burn out at this rate and—"
He paused and looked over Sam's shoulder at one of the cottage windows and froze.
Sam turned to look to see Silk staring out the window, face pressed against the glass, her eyes fully dilated and locked with laser focus on the stallion's neck.
He shivered. "You'd think they'd have a special reserve for ponies in her condition… The Tirek thing couldn't have gotten that many ponies hurt, could it?"
Sam shrugged. "Didn't bother me at all."
The stallion frowned for a moment, then hummed suspiciously. "That's right. It didn't. I saw you flying while everypony was drained. How did you do that?"
Sam unzipped her jumpsuit just enough to show him her gem and tapped it with a finger. "Aliens."
He rolled his eyes, the gesture somehow reminding Sam that his name was Russet, and they sometimes played poker together at the Turning Tavern on the weekends.
"Sam, a lot of things are real, but alien abductors who do medical experiments on ponies aren't," Russet said as politely and calmly as he could. "We asked Enox about it, remember? No one up there comes out here."
"She did," Sam pointed out quickly.
"She got lost. That's different," Russet corrected.
It was Sam's turn to roll her eyes. "I've got a gem in my chest that has magic even when everypony else doesn't and a one-of-a-kind medical condition that's baffling doctors to this day, and I remember getting both of them as a filly after I was pulled out of the sky by a bright light."
She trotted over to the hedge to jab a mechanical finger into Russet's barrel and proclaimed. "Aliens!"
"If you say so," Russet said in that dismissive way everypony did when they refused to believe her.
She huffed and turned to walk back to the shed. "There's a shapeshifting slug creature that turns into your heart's desire who works at the hardware store, and you don't believe me about an alien abduction…"
"Uh…" Russet raised an eyebrow. "That's just Silk? She works nights."
Sam stopped walking, turned around, and gave the stallion two loving head pats. "No, she works from home. She's the containment monitor agent. You're just in love. Imma gonna fix the pump now, okay?"
Russet nodded and trotted back into his house, perhaps a little too giddily to hold on to any dignity. Not that Sam noticed with the fog closing in on her mind.
Did I take four? A dose is four, Sam thought to herself as she refocused on the task at hoof.
She opened the shed's door and stepped into the dark, oddly dusty interior. The simple wood structure seemed like it spontaneously created dust just to irritate and inconvenience everypony, but Sam knew that wasn't the case. It would have been in the documentation if it was.
She walked through the shed, moving around the random piles of assorted gardening supplies and holiday decorations to a metal control box at the back. The box's door had a single rune etched into the front. Sam had no idea what it was exactly, just that it was some religion's holy symbol they'd put there as a final precaution.
Sam unlocked the box with a separate key from the shed's padlock. It creaked open on slightly rusty hinges, revealing a slightly modified hydroponic garden controller, nutrient injectors, and circulation pump.
Sam removed a thick phone-book-like manual from her right saddlebag and flipped to page 38.
Identification Number/Code: 834 - Silkwing "Storybook Vampire"
Entity Description:
Silkwing is a female thestral (commonly called "bat pony") of average height and build. Her fur is charcoal gray, her mane is deep purple, and her eyes are blood red. She bears a cutiemark of a waxing crescent moon partially obscured behind a dark cloud.
Sam rolled her eyes and skipped down the page to the CARE protocols.
Silkwing's residence will include a shallow moat constructed along the property line. As Silkwing can not cross a body of running water by any means other than a bridge, any bridge over the moat is to be removed from her side of the property line, and a pump contained in a shed she does not own (and has not been invited into) is to be activated to circulate the water in the moat.
Should she be deprived of food for over two weeks, the moat should be infused with 50 ml of garlic oil and 20 grams of salt once a day for seven days. This infusion will cause Silkwing severe burns on contact (from which she will regenerate rapidly but continue to be repelled by). It should only be used if there is an imminent threat to the safety of her local community due to starvation.
The water should be drained, the moat cleaned, and fresh water added once Silkwing is no longer starving.
There was more on the report, but Sam didn't care. She'd gotten the part she needed.
Sam put the manual back in her saddlebag, fished out a sticky note, quickly wrote down how much garlic and salt to add and under what circumstance, and stuck the note to the inside of the control box's door.
The amount of time I'd save if the last guy had just done this is insane, Sam noted as she started looking at the pump itself. After all that was what was broken.
A quick inspection of the pump showed it to be completely fine, aside from the power cable having been chewed through by a rodent of some kind. On the inside of the still intact and formerly locked metal box.
Sam sighed, pulled her walkie-talkie off her belt, and used her manipulator gauntlet to depress the transmit button.
"Base, this is Sam reporting from the shed on Silk's property," Sam said, careful to not imply the shed was Silk's and thereby allow the vampire to enter and switch off the pump if she so chose.
"I read you, Sam. But you need to say over at the end of a transmission, over," Apple reapplied almost instantly.
Sam rolled her eyes immediately. "The pump is down because something chewed the power cable. I can splice it, but it will need to be replaced soon. Also, the box was sealed, so someone let a phase rat out of its cage. Over."
"Noted. I'll put in an order for one. However, we don't have anything called phase rats on file because that's not an integer. Over," Apple said with his usual adamant refusal to deviate from protocol by just one word.
Sam's left eye twitched as the Pep Pills tempered Irbish rage down into mere extreme irritation. "Someone let an instance of 392 out, over." She said through clenched teeth.
"I'll let the Sheriff know, thank you for your report. Over," Apple finished.
Sam took a deep breath and wondered if she'd find her employer in the second volume of the manual somewhere. The one she had yet to receive. Surely he had been assigned here by Celestia herself for his anomalously high bureaucratic mud-stickiness.
As soon as she was calm enough to think about the work before her, instead of her mighty need to strangle that dumb horse, Sam began to splice the power cable back together so she could solder it.
This was a normal day for the town of Evergreen Falls. A little town in the heart of the deep woods, so far from anywhere that most ponies didn't even know it existed. Kept off the map by royal decree, so anything or anyone a little too unusual or dangerous in the wrong circumstances could be safely and happily kept out of harm's way.
It was simply the modern evolution of Princess Celestia's MO. Rather than seal it away for a thousand years in a realm of torment, talk to it first (assuming you could) and see if they would rather have a normal life in Evergreen Falls instead.
That wasn't why Sam had come to town, though. She'd arrived of her own accord for different reasons. Fortunately for her, she fit in like a bespoke suit. Without her current financial crisis, she'd be deeply in love with the backwater Home for the Weird as it called itself. If the town wasn't classified, it would likely have done its best to have a "weird off" with Ponyville.
Fifteen minutes into the job and the power cable was good as secondhoof. Soldered, electrical taped, and then duct taped for good measure. Sam nodded in satisfaction, switched the pump on, made sure the garlic and salt had been injected into the moat, then closed the panel and relocked it.
A moment later, she closed and re-secured the shed's padlock and found herself walking back up to Silk's door. Sam paused at the entrance staring at the knocker. The combination of the low dose of Pep Pills and general fatigue had her blanking on how many times to knock.
"Hey!" Sam called on a whim. "How many times do I knock to not trigger you?"
"Six," the vampire called from her living room, "but you can also—"
Sam took hold of the knocker and struck the door six times.
The door opened immediately, revealing Silk's haggard face holding an expression normally reserved for poker.
"— just call for me since I know you're here," Silk finished.
Sam nodded three times, then pointed over her shoulder to the now flowing moat. "Fixed the pump. Want to make sure the moat's running enough to count as running water?"
Silk smiled faintly. "That's a great idea. Counterpoint," she pointed up. "Sun."
Silk said the word sun similarly to how most ponies, said Queen Chrysalis.
Sam looked up, accidentally looking directly into the sun and scrunching her face in pain. "Ow… Right."
"Also," Silk said, stepping as close to Sam as the hateful light permitted, her eyes narrowing into dangerous slits. "You stay away from Russet! He's mine."
Sam blinked and tilted her head. "I'm gay," she said quite honestly. "You know this."
Silk blushed deeply and took a half step back from the door.
"That's right. Forgot. Sorry, very hungry," she murmured before collecting herself and proclaiming. "Well then, uh, you stay away from me! I'm his. Maybe. If he stops being so thick-headed! And… I don't try and eat him later… Though to be honest, I might spare him. Haven't liked anypony this much in a long time."
Sam nodded understandingly and trotted a ways down the path towards the sidewalk.
"We're still friends though, right?" Silk yelled through the closed door.
"Yea, it's cool. You're not my type anyways," Sam answered, perhaps a bit too honestly.
Silk retreated to the depths of her home, drawing the curtains closed before the morning sun could flood her home and prompting Sam to briefly wonder why nopony had ordered the mare some UV-blocking window treatments before she remembered she had to report in, again.
Sam stepped to the side of the road and raised her walkie-talkie to her face once more. "Sam here. Job's done. I'm burnt out. I need to clear my head and sleep."
By which she meant smoke the mother of all joints to try and overwhelm the Pep Pills by sheer brute force so she wouldn't effectively pull a 48-hour day.
"Before you do—" Apple began, but Sam was having none of it.
"What's that?" She said, making a crackling noise with her mouth. "I can't hear you. Going through a tunnel."
"Sam, that's very obviously you making those noises, over," Apple said with audible irritation.
"You look here, mister!" Sam snapped, her eye twitching again. "It's not my fault I'm currently the only pony in town with a contractor's license. I get you have to hire out! But I am one mare, and I am entirely drained, and I am pretty sure that even though I keep agreeing to fix things immediately, this constitutes a violation of labor laws!"
Apple was quiet for a few minutes. "I looked into it, and you're right. We cannot legally make you work longer than 36 hours in emergency circumstances, and normally no more than 14. My apologies. I didn't know the emergency protocols had been rewritten last year. As you've been over the limit for five hours, we owe you… Six thousand bits in compensation. I'll append it to your check. Please, go get some rest. Over."
Sam took a deep breath and let it out her nose slowly. "What did it say previously?"
"Please say over at the end of your—"
"What. Did it say. Previously?"
"Previously, we could make use of any employee until the emergency was resolved, and a critical lack of staff is one of the written examples of an emergency," Apple said with just the hint of embarrassment. "If you must know, I don't enjoy overworking anypony. However, since the others decided they would make three times as much rebuilding Ponyville after its disasters, we're the only two ponies here who can keep this community safe and happy. I see this work as a duty, not labor. That being said, you are correct I cannot legally require you to work as hard as I do, nor can I ethically do so, on reflection. Over."
Sam's eye twitched enough for her cheek to get in on the action. "Excuse me?! You? Work? What do you do other than tell me what to go fix?"
"I am not only the Maintenance Dispatcher but also the lead researcher on Object 92. Over," Apple said.
Sam's lips pulled into a frown. She removed the manual from her bag, checked the index, then flipped to the appropriate page. "Oh, the… Crystal planet system, thing?"
"Correct, over."
Sam glanced down the page to the list of incident reports. Whatever the unknown collection of crystals orbiting one another was, it sure did cause a lot of minor disasters when poked at. Including causing several ponies to vanish from the material sphere entirely. Seemingly on a whim.
Sam frowned. The object felt important to her personally... But why?
"Okay, so… Sorry you have to work two jobs. Can you take care of whatever this thing is while I try to sleep? Please?" Sam begged, her lip trembling.
"No. But I am certain I can find a civilian who can," Apple replied in his usual flat tone, having apparently used up his allotted emotional time for the day. "1839 returned from her latest adventure and is simply frightened."
Sam knew that one by heart. Or at least, she thought she did. She vaguely remembered a little filly which she was basically a big sister slash mom for.
Buck me. Either I took the wrong number of tabs or those are expired… Or I'm starting to build up a tolerance. I should quit for a while. Sam thought to herself before focusing back on the conversation. "That's the filly who gets lost and—"
"And has adventures in parallel dimensions, yes. Apparently, this one was quite grim. Are you using stimulants to remain awake again? Over."
Sam groaned and rubbed her face with a hoof. "Yes. I am. I told you I needed to sleep. Would she be cool snuggling up and just... Having a nap?"
Apple remained silent for a few more minutes, presumably talking to the poor filly. "She says no, because she's worried about some kind of monster that invades dreams. She said she would be okay with you sleeping in the same room if she can play on your computer."
I don't own a computer… Sam thought, frowning before she remembered the computer in the observatory breakroom. "Oh! Uh, yea. Sure. Just have someone drop her off. I'll stay up till she gets there. Over."
"Roger. Over and out," Apple finished.
Sam clipped her walkie-talkie back into her belt and began to trot up the road toward the observatory. She wished she could fly over, the trip would take her seconds. She wished she could at least humm a tune or let her brain float off into a fantasy while she trekked up the hilly road.
I wish I could afford drugs without side effects… Sam grumbled mentally as she walked face-first into a pale white earth pony mare who had appeared in front of her from thin air.
"Ow," the two said in unison.
Sam blinked twice to refocus herself. Her eyes slowly traced over the monochromatic white mare, noting her black eyes, hourglass cutie mark, and starting the hamster wheel spinning for half a second before she backed up and apologized. "Oh, uh, sorry Dusk. I'm not… At a hundred percent right now."
Dusk dusted off her fur with a hoof and nodded. "Clearly not. Good to see you again, Sam. I have good news for…"
Dusk trailed off, frowning, her eyes slowly narrowing. "You took either too much or too little of something. Why?"
Sam nodded sharply. "Yeah. Pep Pills. I was up till, like, six today. The spiders chewed through the bolts so I had to put in an entire new security grate up in the culvert. Took… Like fourteen hours. Then Silk's moat broke, so, I got like, no sleep? It was an emergency. I'dda passed out if I didn't. I'm going to sleep now. Can this wait?"
Dusk shook her head. "No. It can't. And it's important, and I don't have much time to talk so…" Dusk waved her hoof.
Sam felt the drug leave her system, followed by the briefest jolt of throbbing pain as her body panicked over suddenly lacking the chemicals, then the cooling relief of a full rest washed over her.
The world changed like a light switch had been flipped. Colors didn't change, but how they made Sam feel different things came back. Yellows looked happy again. Blues were calming. Pinks were fun. The birdsong sounded pleasant instead of random. Her mind started being able to focus on more than one task at a time again.
Sam shivered and blinked several times. "Oh, yep! I bucked up the dose there. For sure. Wow, that was so much worse than I tho—" She stopped talking for a moment, realizing she was talking to Dusk.
Dusk wasn't an ordinary friend. She was one of Sam's oldest friends. A second mother. Also the reaper. Not somepony with an odd power claiming the title, but the real deal.
Sam's ears fell. "Oh… Hey… So… Not that I'm not happy to see you, but, what's wrong? Am I dead?"
“No,” Dusk answered.
“Aww…” Sam jokingly drooped her ears. “Not having to pay back the bank would have been nice.”
Dusk flicked her hoof and reconstituted the drug she'd removed into its tablet form. "It's a good thing, not a bad thing. The thing I stopped by for, I mean," Dusk said as she looked at the pills. "You took three of those, by the way."
Sam winced. "Ah. I was supposed to take four," she sighed and shook her head. "I was forgetting friend's names! Buck… I think I'll stay away from those for a while."
Dusk nodded in agreement and banished the tablets to the shadow realm without so much as a spark of magic or flash of light.
"So," she began. "Remember how when you moved here, I said you would be near an old friend of mine?"
Sam nodded, remaining quiet so Dusk could just tell her the thing instead of getting bunny trailed until they wound up at a bar playing beer darts like they often did.
"Well, they passed. Their kid needs a home and job. You need some help around here, and I want them with my chosen weirdos. Especially since I doubt she could walk the streets anywhere else."
Sam's heart soared with joy. "You got the mayor to agree to hire more workers?"
Dusk snorted and shook her head. "Not yet, but you know she won't say no to me. She's got no idea I'm a friend."
The two mares shared a quick laugh before Dusk smiled and continued. "Also, the object. I found somepony who can crack its secrets. I've arranged her employment since fate's moving her here anyways. Which means—"
Sam nodded once. "Which means it's time for me to go through with my part of the deal."
Dusk put a hoof on Sam's shoulder. "It will be fine! I promise I'll get you back up as often as needed. And she's smart! Maybe nothing will go wrong… Aunt Fate willing."
Sam bit her lip in consideration. "Well, a deal is a deal. But there's a complication. Apple's currently in charge of studying it. He'll have to be persuaded to give it up."
Dusk rolled her eyes. "As if that's an obstacle," she shook her head and grinned again. "Cheer up! Tell you what. I'll give you your pay in advance."
Sam laughed and shook her head, flicking her tail back and forth. "Too bad it's not money…"
Dusk nodded slowly, frowning. "Yeah… I'll see what I can do for you if I get time. For now," Dusk tapped the gemstone in Sam's chest through her jumpsuit. "No matter who or what put this there, seriously we're not having the aliens debate again, it's called a Harmony Shard. The same as those used to forge the Elements of Harmony, but without the arcane circuitry which makes an Element an Element. I don't know what it's attuned to. I don't know the limits of its powers. But here's a book you can read to start tapping into it better."
Dusk unfolded an ancient tome from thin air, holding it out to Sam. Despite clearly being extremely old, it was bound in metal. Platinum, if Sam knew her metal colors correctly. The pages were yellowed with age, but clearly a form of plastic rather than paper.
Sam eyed the book skeptically. "... Who makes a book like that?" She asked before taking the book and frowning at the strange runes on the cover. "And is this even a language I can read?"
Dusk shook her head. "Nope, but ask your kid. She reads it. Same writing as her cutiemark."
"Dew isn't my kid," Sam protested as she put the book into her saddlebag.
Dusk raised an eyebrow at the handymare. "Isn't she?"
Sam huffed and reared up to cross her forehooves over her chest in indignation. "She's not my kid! She's just a filly I take care of for free because I love her."
Dusk snickered. "Sam, that's a kid."
"Yea, but I didn't make her!" Sam retorted.
"That doesn't matter," Dusk said with a growing smirk.
Sam lowered herself back down and gestured towards town. "She's not even technically a kid! She's literally hundreds of years older than me."
"Meh," Dusk shrugged. "Her aging process stopped. She acts her apparent age. She's a kid."
Sam huffed and sat down on the road, defeated. "Okay, yes. She is… But if she's my kid then that makes me old and I don't want to feel old."
Dusk manifested a silver watch around her left foreleg and checked it. "You've got 243 years left, if I don’t gift you more for Hearthswarming. Almost a whole pony lifetime. That's not old at all!"
Sam flicked her ears back. "I told you not to do that…"
Dusk frowned. "But the number got bigger! I thought you'd be happy to know—"
"It's still creepy and—" Sam froze mid-sentence, her face turning pale. "Oh my gosh! Dew's back! She's scared and I told Apple to just drop her off at—"
Sam turned around and jumped into the air, flapping her wings frantically to take off as quickly as possible. "See you later, gotta pick her up, bye!"
Dusk waved after her, calling out "Bye!" before warping herself a few hundred meters to the south.
It was time for death to do the opposite of her job, and save the mare about to drown in the lake.